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BEA Systems Inc.’s Project Beehive will get a boost next Monday when the company announces at JavaOne that the Eclipse organization is working on a “top level” project that will support the product, according to sources.

Project Beehive, announced last month, was heralded by the company as the industry’s first open source foundation for building service-oriented architectures and enterprise-class Java based applications. It is based on BEA’s WebLogic Workshop application framework.

Company officials consider the support from the Eclipse organization a significant win because now any applications developer using Eclipse has access to the controls framework along with the library controls that have been created by the company’s business partners.

They also believe the project will broaden the number of developers that will be exposed to the controls model and the framework, which will likely add more momentum to Beehive, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans.

BEA’s partners that have invested time and money in writing controls for the company’s Workshop or Beehive products will also benefit. By making these controls available to a much larger set of corporate developers, they can better “maximize” the value of their investments and gain access to a larger Eclipse-based audience, company officials are expected to say next week.

Through the upcoming project, developers will now have the option of accessing Java Enterprise Edition 2.0-compatible resources as a property, which is a wizard-driven. In addition, bringing the Beehive Framework to Eclipse can help make developers more productive by reducing the amount of repetitive J2EE code needed for application development. Yet another advantage, according to company officials, is Eclipse developers will gain tighter integration between the controls model and the controls framework.

The new support will now let developers build controls that can be used in BEA’s WebLogic and Apache environments. BEA’s longer term goal is to ensure that developers can access the controls framework in the broadest possible set of tools and Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) that can deploy the controls to a range of different platforms.